Ian would say it is time to make a list. He is a great maker of lists. I’m always finding them, stuck in mirrors, in the corner of picture frames, lurking under books. They are usually quite short and abrupt, but always numbered. Ian says the moment he has made a list, his mind clears. The list gives him clear objectives, and even if he doesn’t go ahead and obey them, he feels better. Problems appear not so serious, the demands of time not so impossible to manage. So today I am going to write down a list, Ian-fashion, to see if it will help. The fact is, Mum is right, the title of my dissertation doesn’t work. I need to re-title it. The existing one is just confusing me. Claudia will be annoyed, but that can’t be helped. She is the one, after all, who tells me that my purpose is not clear and I’m floundering. My list will be of other possible titles. But first I plan to make a sort of question-and-answer list – I’ll ask the questions bothering me, then try to answer them. I need to be specific to get anywhere. The first question is: can grandmothers have a direct and important influence on grandchildren? I ask it because I read an article recently in which Bertrand Russell was quoted as having claimed that his grandmother ‘moulded’ his life. I can’t remember the exact quotation, though I copied it down and I’ve got it somewhere, but it was about his grandmother’s contempt for convention passing on to him. Her motto had been: ‘Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil,’ and he made it his.
So the answer to that one will be, ‘Yes, sometimes.’ It’s a start.
Ian’s worried that I spend too much time in the past. He’s wrong. What he sees as pessimism or a negative attitude is my nature. I’ve done the kind of work that looks to the future, when I was teaching, before I ever met him. I had almost eight years of it, before I came back to studying, and I was never as happy as I am now. My job then was all about the future of the students. I mixed with them all the time, on the surface having ‘a great life’. I travelled round the world and I found myself aching for peace and quiet and books and seriousness and a purpose. I had the curiosity to try to find out something, something that interested me, however trivial it might seem to others.
We don’t argue about it, Ian and I. I don’t try to defend myself. There’s no need. He should be more concerned with his own attitude to life. I love the past, Ian seems to hate it to such an extent that he won’t allow it to have existed.
VI
CLAUDIA WAS IN a mellow mood today, by which I mean she wasn’t sitting with her spine so straight it might have had a steel rod inserted in it, and her hands were not clasped tightly on her neatly aligned knees. For her, she looked quite relaxed. Her facial expression was different too. It wasn’t that inscrutable stare that I always felt could only have been attained after hours of practice in front of a mirror. She actually smiled as she greeted me, only fleetingly, but I was grateful. I risked a ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’ but that was a step too far and I only got a nod in return, and then there was the usual enquiring raising of her eyebrows as she waited.
I took a deep breath and said I wanted to change the title of my dissertation. I said it no longer described what I was hoping to investigate and that I felt it was misleading. She frowned. Her back visibly straightened. I held out to her a piece of paper on which I’d written my proposed new title. She took it as though it were something distasteful, holding it by the very tip of the corner of the paper. Then there was a lengthy pause, during which she looked at the words on the A4 sheet and then at me and then back again. Dear God, there were only twenty-three words there, why the scrutiny? There was a sigh, a long pause, and then she said that it seemed a lot of fuss about very little – the new (‘new’ said with emphasis) title appeared very like the original one, but if I preferred this wording, ‘so be it’.
That over, I ran through the work I’d done since I last saw her, including thoughts about grandmothers in children’s literature. She seemed quite pleased about these, but less approving when I rambled on about wanting to consider whether grandmothers were more important for their link to the past or to the future. She asked what I meant about this ‘link’ to the future, how could grandmothers possibly provide such a thing? I said they’d travelled the road themselves and so they could provide a map. ‘The road?’ Claudia echoed. ‘Which road is this?’ I got flustered and couldn’t explain what I meant (not surprising, as I didn’t know). She accused me of being glib. I switched hurriedly to the idea of grandmothers providing cohesion in a changing society. ‘Cohesion?’ she said, in the same tone of voice. I cleared my throat, and tried to sound confident. I said the whole idea of the family was changing and with it the place of the grandmother within it. One-parent families are common, and families with gay parents, and so the grandmother is crucial to keeping these new sorts of families together. ‘How?’ Claudia asked.
I didn’t bloody well know how, but it sounded good. For the next half-hour I struggled on, trying to back up this claim, throwing in stuff about the new non-nuclear family needing a point of reference and so on. Claudia listened, sighing a lot in that infuriating way she has, the sigh coming out of her nose and not her mouth, the nostrils flaring and unflaring, and the mouth pursed below it. It made her look ugly. My mind wandered, and I thought that if I put a mirror in front of her she would stop doing that. As I floundered on, talk for talk’s sake, very full of sound and signifying nothing, she began to pick imaginary bits of fluff off her immaculate skirt. I thought that at any minute she was going to say I was talking nonsense and if I couldn’t become more lucid there was serious doubt over whether I should be permitted to continue with this dissertation. But she didn’t. Instead, she asked if she might be allowed – ‘might be allowed’, a good one that – to suggest that I should look at the grandmother being not so much a cohesive force but on the contrary an inhibitor of social change in modern society. I admitted this had never occurred to me. How could a grandmother inhibit change? Think, Claudia said, of immigrant communities. Grandmothers arrive with their families not just unable to speak the new language needed but unlikely ever to learn it. It is in their own interest to resist the infiltration of the new language into the family, and this applies to codes of dress and manners and customs, and of course religion. The grandmother fights a losing battle but she fights hard, and what does that do to the family? How does her resistance erode her status within the family?
The Bertrand Russell quote about his grandmother ‘moulding’ him sprang into my head and I produced it with a flourish at this point. I asked Claudia if this was what she meant, that if grandmothers tried to mould grandchildren, and they were doing this against the grain in immigrant families, then perhaps they became dangerous? Claudia said not necessarily – they could equally become powerless and therefore not at all dangerous. But by then she was looking at her watch all the time. The session was over. As I stood up to leave, she said, ‘You quoted Bertrand Russell. Worth looking at his wife Dora, perhaps.’
Claudia is constantly exposing my ignorance, but then I suppose it’s part of her job. To my shame, I didn’t know anything Dora Russell. She was Bertrand Russell’s second wife and an interesting, impressive person in her own right, with a first from Cambridge and a reputation as an influential feminist in the 1920s and 1930s. I liked the sound of her already.
I discovered she had two children by Bertrand Russell and two more by an American she had an affair with while still married to Russell. She was fifty-three when her first grandchild was born, a girl, Sarah, her son John’s daughter. He went on to give her another granddaughter, Lucy (and he had adopted his wife’s daughter Ann, by a previous relationship). John and his wife lived in the USA, so Dora didn’t see much of her granddaughters in their early years, but later on her son moved to London and she got to know the girls as teenagers. She was by then living in Cornwall and was proud of keeping open house for her family. She wanted the younger members to know that this was a place they and their friends could come and be accepted as they were without fear of being judged. But when they did come, especiall
y Lucy and Sarah, she was shocked by their appearance and attitude. They were, she wrote, ‘like mendicant friars’, clad in an assortment of rags, arriving hungry and expecting to be fed, depending on free hospitality and giving nothing back in return. Sarah, who had once pleased her by getting a scholarship to Oxford, had dropped out of her course, and Lucy gave up her place at the Sorbonne. Their grandmother argued fiercely with them, trying to persuade them that education was the starting point for everything and should not be spurned, but she couldn’t persuade them. Their rejection of education was to her the most awful waste and an insult to everything she held dear. How could such clever young women just drift about, apparently with no purpose? It was a mystery to her and she tried to think of an explanation. What she came up with was the theory that they had been affected by the Hiroshima bomb. It had made them conclude that nothing mattered, nothing was worthwhile. Dora disagreed strongly with this nihilistic attitude. It was everyone’s duty, she said, to protest against iniquities like nuclear bombs – they ought to be doing what she herself was doing, i.e. leading anti-nuclear demonstrations.
But try though she might, her words had no effect on these girls. Their grandmother, far from moulding them in her own image, appeared merely to convince them that she was misguided and there was no hope. Far from growing out of her tramp-like existence, Lucy, who had become a Buddhist, seemed to grow more and more unhinged. She said she was going to become a Buddhist nun. To her grandmother’s (and everyone else’s) horror, she then burned herself to death, emulating the example of some Buddhist nuns and monks in Vietnam. Strangely, though Dora mourned the loss of such a ‘lovely young woman, brave, gifted in mind and spirit’, she thought that her granddaughter after her death belonged ‘to those we honour without medals’. Even though Dora could not agree with her, she reckoned that Lucy had acted out her convictions, and by drawing attention to the bombing of Cambodia by the Americans at the time, had made a protest she considered important and worthwhile.
At first I couldn’t get past the manner of poor Lucy’s death to think about Dora, and how she’d reacted to it, but then I began to see the challenge she as a grandmother had faced. There was very little detail in Dora’s account of how, where and exactly when Lucy had committed her dreadful act, and it worried me. Dora found all this too painful to write about, but the information must be available. Somehow, without it, the whole death seemed unbelievable. The ordeal for Dora didn’t end with Lucy’s death. For a woman who prided herself on her understanding of young people, and who had been so tolerant of their waywardness, it was a blow to her pride as well as being a tragedy. She obviously felt she had failed the girl. Like so many grandmothers, she hadn’t always approved of how her grandchildren were being brought up, and now she felt she ought to have tried harder to exert more influence. She wasn’t the sort of woman to keep her opinions to herself but perhaps she hadn’t, in the case of Lucy, voiced them loudly enough. Whatever – she never stopped grieving for Lucy for the rest of her life.
Then, pondering all this until late in the night, it struck me that the Dora/Lucy relationship might indicate that there is a gulf between grandmothers and granddaughters that can’t be bridged because the grandmothers can’t grasp the nature of the problems the granddaughters are grappling with – they remain in their own world and can’t comprehend the modern one. Dora Russell thought, I’m sure, that she had moved with the times, but had she? Maybe Lucy didn’t think so. But my argument, such as it was, is weakened now I know the story of Dora and Lucy Russell. The grandmother as an influence, the grandmother as a cohesive force, the grandmother as mentor . . . I don’t think so. What, then?
Surprisingly, Ian was interested in the Dora/Lucy history. He knows a bit about Buddhism. He says there’s nothing in it that calls for the sort of death Lucy gave herself. Ian says Buddhism is about destroying greed and hatred, and through doing so attaining enlightenment. Lucy wasn’t going to attain any enlightenment by burning herself to death. ‘It was a form of protest,’ I said, ‘against what the Americans were doing in Cambodia.’
‘A pointless form of protest,’ Ian said.
‘Well, it called attention to what was happening, and—’
‘And did no good whatsoever.’
‘At least she had principles, she was brave, she—’
‘Rubbish. Like her grandmother said, people with principles who want to defeat evil fight against it. They don’t kill themselves. That’s defeatist, it’s the easy way out.’
‘Easy? Burning yourself to death? Please! Think of the pain, the agony, the fear . . .’
‘She was probably on LSD, doped to the eyeballs.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘It’s a reasonable guess, it would fit.’
Neither of us knows much about Lucy Russell, but it’s strange the way Ian and I interpret what happened differently. He is on the whole contemptuous of her. He sees her as mad, or at the very least mentally unstable due to taking drugs (though he has no evidence that she did). Her death doesn’t upset him. It doesn’t even really puzzle him – she was mad, mad people do mad things, end of story. But I feel for her. My skin crawls just with reading the little her grandmother writes about her death. I imagine the smell of the petrol she poured over herself, I imagine the whoosh of it taking fire, I imagine the heat, and then the beginning of the pain . . . I torture myself by trying to imagine it all. Then I think of Dora. How did she hear about it? She doesn’t say. Her mind would be flooded with memories of Lucy, happy ones, disturbing ones, she’d hear her voice, see her young face, and nothing would make sense. She would surely feel she had passed on nothing to her granddaughter. Lucy had ignored her, she’d gone off at a wild tangent, rejecting Dora’s brand of idealism.
There must be this hopelessness built into the role of grandmother when such tragedies overtake their family. Their own living must seem a sham. They can’t stop anything, they just have to witness events, some so terrible they have never envisaged them. I said this to Ian. He shrugged his shoulders, but didn’t say anything in reply. ‘What does a grandmother do if she sees something going wrong with a grandchild and the parent isn’t doing anything about it?’ I was just pondering aloud, not expecting him to make any comment.
‘She can’t do anything if the child doesn’t ask her.’
‘She could remonstrate with the child’s parents.’
‘Some parents can’t be remonstrated with. Some parents are shit.’
He said this so angrily that I knew at once this was personal, but in view of how Ian had always resented any enquiry whatsoever about his family, I didn’t dare pick up on it. I tried to do it sideways, though. ‘They aren’t shit for no reason,’ I said, ‘and the grandmother would know the reason.’
‘Oh, don’t give me that rubbish. Reasons aren’t excuses.’
‘You mean grandmothers know the reasons but they make excuses?’
‘No, I don’t mean that.’
‘What do you mean then?’
‘How did this start? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. All I meant was that grandmothers can’t always do anything about bad situations to do with their grandchildren. They might want to, but they can’t.’
‘So they suffer silently and watch the grandchild suffering . . .’
‘I’m bored with this now. You’re getting all hypothetical. We were talking about Dora Russell, that’s all. I know your game, Issy, and I’m not going to play it, so don’t think you’re being clever and leading me on to confession time. There’s nothing to confess, OK?’
No, it wasn’t OK, but I stopped. I stopped, but I filed away in my mind Ian’s reaction. It was easy to deduce he had something to hide on the subject of both parents and grandmothers. I will bide my time.
Isa has left a message. I haven’t seen her since Dad told me his story, and I realise I’ve been putting a visit off because I’m nervous, knowing how much I must conceal. Suppose I give something away? Suppose something shows in my eyes, a flicker of
the doubt I now feel, or even a suggestion of accusation. She is no longer the grandmother I thought she was, in every sense. I won’t be able to be my usual self. Will she spot the change in my attitude, however hard I try to hide it? Well, I can’t go on not visiting her. I listened to her message again. She would like me to come and visit her, and would I please ring her to arrange a convenient time. ‘That is the end of my message. Have you understood it?’ Her voice sounded unusually shaky, but maybe just because of her age. May’s voice still sounds young – not young young, but sort of fifty-ish – whereas recently Isa’s voice betrays her years more than anything else about her. Maybe it’s an accent thing too – Isa is so refined, she enunciates every word so carefully, whereas May never pauses and there’s still an energy about her delivery. May, of course, hates people who ‘talk posh’. She says there’s no need for it. If I point out that they can’t help it, it’s how they were brought up, it’s the schools they went to, she won’t excuse them. The young princes, William and Harry, please her very much by not talking too posh – she’s heard them being interviewed and they spoke ‘very nice, proper but not posh’.
Ringing Isa back, I got the faithful and deeply irritating Elspeth. ‘Mrs Symondson is not so well,’ Elspeth said, in a definitely accusatory tone of voice. ‘She hasn’t been so well since your last visit.’ Why Isa thinks Elspeth so marvellous I can’t imagine. She’s odious, a creepy sort of woman, appearing deferential when that is the last thing she is. Her role in Isa’s household is quite odd. She doesn’t clean – Mrs Roberts comes twice a week to do that – but she does some dusting; she doesn’t cook dinners, but she prepares light lunches and bakes cakes – baking is her speciality and she’s very good at it. In many ways she’s like a sort of latter-day lady’s maid, fussing over Isa and ever ready to be called for to do something minor. Elspeth has a low opinion of me. She clearly thinks I am not nearly attentive enough to my grandmother. I bet she’s careful never directly to criticise me to Isa – it’ll just be a word here and there, letting the odd suggestion drop that I don’t visit often these days, etc. Will Isa pick up on her sneaky words? No, I don’t think so, but they’ll register if repeated often enough.
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